Sylvain Tesson - Consolations of the Forest - Alone in a Cabin in the Middle Taiga

Rancé’s flight fascinates and repels me in equal measure. His extremism dazzles me, his motive shocks and disgusts me. In the abbé ’s anxieties, there is something of the feverish child who exclaims to the heavens: ‘I want the absolute and I want it now !’

The impulsive impatience is superb, but the fire is morbid, devouring everything that lies outside an expectation of the afterlife. Out on the taiga, I would rather gather up moments of felicity than intoxicate myself with the absolute. The scent of azaleas delights me more than that of incense. I beam at fresh blossoms instead of at a silent sky. As for the rest – simplicity, austerity, oblivion, renunciation and indifference to comfort – I admire and willingly imitate that.

This morning, fog. The world wiped out. It’s weather for water sprites. When the cottony mist dissipates, I set out to fish the river at North Cedar Cape. Fishing: you gain a fish but lose some time. Worth it?

I let the flies drift along the current and keep them suspended in the water, about four or five feet below the surface, where the fish gather to glean the nutritious outfall from the rivers. The thrill when the cork takes a dive: dinner will be served! When I kill a char, shivers run over its skin as life leaves in electrical discharges. The skin then loses its lustre. Life is what gives us colour.

In Life of Rancé , this quotation from the Elegies of Tibullus: ‘How sweet it is while lying in bed to hear fierce winds.’ The wind rampages all day long and I read my Tibullus.

The lashing surf has washed the rocks. I advance carefully, trying not to slip. The dogs are afraid of the waves, which have teeth so they can bite the earth. The points of the capes are hidden by flying foam. The wind is still carrying on in the dark forest; the taiga crackles. The occasional gull shoots by. Millions of flies have hatched out on the shingle, covering entire sections of beach. The dogs lick them up. The flies live only a week and the animals love them: free protein and easy pickings. The sand is starred with plantigrade tracks: flat-footed bears have come down to the feast.

The dogs can’t manage to cross the River Lednaya. Aika has jumped onto a rock in the middle of the current and waits for me to come wading through the churning water to get her. Bek wails pitifully, convinced that we’re plotting to desert him. I cross again to ferry him over on my shoulders. To get past the abrupt shoreline north of the river, I go up onto slopes littered from landslides. These cliffs and their way of murmuring: ‘Hey sweetie, come on over here…’ The wind’s nasty humour gives me wings.

I reach my goal: a cascading torrent of a river almost two miles north of the Lednaya. A good spot for fish but three hours away. The dogs nose around for a moment, then go to sleep under the awnings of the rhododendrons. I admire the ease with which they collapse at the slightest respite. My new motto: in all things, do as a dog does! Bionics takes its inspiration from biology and applies it to technology. We need a school of ethobionics that would use animal behaviour to guide our actions. At the moment of decision, instead of seeking counsel from our heroes – what would Marcus Aurelius, Lancelot or Geronimo have done? – we would ask ourselves: ‘And now, what would my dog decide? Or a horse? Or a tiger? Or even an oyster (a model of placidity)?’ Bestiaries would provide our rules of conduct. Ethology – the scientific study of animal behaviour – would become a moral science. I interrupt my reverie when a char pulls my cork down after him. This evening I bring four fish back to the cabin. And I wolf them down, because that’s what animals do.

These rock flies flow down cliffs and tree trunks in silky streams. They are sacred manna. The month of June when the animals need all their vigour for love presents a problem in the cycle of life. How to bridge the gap between the awakening in May and the abundance of July? Nature has come up with – the flies. These poor insects serve as fodder destined to provide energy during a period of penury. In two weeks, their job done, they will vanish after a brief existence, sacrificed in the common biological interest. They don’t forget to live, though: at the slightest touch of sunlight, they go into Brownian motion, quivering with the lightest of vibrations, and mate. Their trembling reminds me of the shiver of a secret joy, and I like them so much that I almost sprain my ankles trying not to crush them on the rocky beaches.

Everything has collapsed. On the satellite phone I save for emergencies and have not yet used to make any calls, five lines appear, more painful than a searing burn. The woman I love has dismissed me. She has lost interest in a man who’s like a straw in the wind. I’ve sinned through my flights, my evasions and this cabin.

After being gone for years, she came back to me when I was just leaving on that first assignment for Lake Baikal. Now she is leaving me, and I’m looking at those same shores. For three hours, I wander along the beach. I’ve let happiness fly away. Life should be nothing but this: giving constant thanks to fate for the slightest blessing. Being happy is knowing that you are.

It’s five in the afternoon. The pain comes in waves; at times I find some relief. I manage to feed the dogs, even to fish. But the ache always returns, with a life of its own: molten lead coursing through my being.

I dream about a little house in the suburbs with a dog, wife and children, protected by a row of fir trees. For all their narrowness, the bourgeoisie has nevertheless understood this essential thing: we must give ourselves the possibility of a minimum of happiness.

I’m condemned to stay in this dead end full of stupid ducks, face to face with my pain.

I have to marshal my strength to make it to the next hour. I bury myself in a book. As soon as I stop reading, I hear those five lines in the sat-phone message shrieking through my skull.

I close the book and cry into my dogs’ fur. I had no idea that fur soaks up tears so well. On human skin, tears slide away. Usually the dogs are capering all over at this hour; tonight, their heads hanging a little, they keep quiet under my miserable flood of weeping. I have only a flare gun with which to blow my brains out. And no guarantee of success. A seal appears above the waterline, just in front of the beach… I tell myself that it’s her, come to smile at me. I must manage to speak to her one last time. You’re always late to your own life; time doesn’t hand out second chances. Life can ride on one roll of the dice. And me, I hared off to the forest, leaving her behind.

I read until I’m worn out, because if my eyes look away from the page, the pain chokes me and forces me to get up. Tonight I keep hearing boats, but it’s the throbbing of my eyes.

I’m padlocked into this Eden I made for myself. The sky is blue yet black. Strange how time withdraws its friendship from you. Just yesterday, it slipped by like satin. Now every second needles me.

To be thirty-eight years old and here, by a lake, crawling and asking a dog why women go away.

Without Aika and Bek, I’d be dead. This afternoon I chop wood from four-thirty to six-thirty until I can’t hold the axe any more. ‘Only the purest of heart can become murderous because of others,’ writes Jim Harrison in Dalva . The wave comes back. Tears are kept in check by reading. In films, wolves retreat before the flames of torches.

I scuttled the ship of my life and realized it when the water was up to the gunwales. Question: it’s seven o’clock; how do I make it to eight? It’s a lovely evening, with pompadour clouds that are a little silly, like those velvet tassels on old-lady curtains. The fish surface and kiss the wavelets, leaving circles that grow larger, fade away.